Re: Replacing foreign characters

["Patricia M. Godfrey" pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

Any and all of the solutions offered should work. If anyone is interested
in the causes of this mess, a colleague and I have been doing some
investigating. The first issue is that XyWrite is ASCII; most Windows
programs use the ANSI/ISO-Latin standard, which is similar but has
important differences. For example, lowercase e aigu (as in café) is 233
in ANSI, 130 in ASCII, and therefore in XyW. To further confound things,
Macs use yet a third coding system, and either of those values, sent by
e-mail, will be read quite differently on a Mac. And of course, any "odd"
character sent from a Mac will come out quite differently on a Wintel
machine. Regardless of OS or app.
	Essential typographic elements?em and en dashes, "smart" quotes,
ellipsis?were never part of "Standard ASCII"; every word processor had
its own schemes for producing them. XyWrite's is particularly rich. (Of
course.) ANSI/ISO-Latin does have codes for these, though they are not
all fully supported in all implementations. Here's a brief list of the
equivalences of some of the more important ones:
Character	XyW	ANSI
em dash		260	151
en dash		259	150
open quotes	264	147
close quotes	265	148
apsotrophe	267	146
ellipsis		258	133

I have been toying with the idea of creating a printer driver (by
modifying the old STRIP.PRN) whose substitution table would effect these
conversions. That way, one could keep one's file in native XyWrite
format, print out hard copy as one might need it, and then PRINTF when
one needed to share it with someone in thrall to Micro$oft. Does anyone
have any thoughts on the usefulness and workability of this?

By the way, in ordinary Windows apps, if one installs the U.S.
International Keyboard, one can get accented letters quite easily by
using quotes for umlauts, apostrophe for aigu, and grave (the lowercase
value of the tilde key) for grave. The keys are dead, and don't register
until you hit the letter you want accented. The downside is that if you
want an open quote, you have to remember to hit the space bar after it,
or the first letter in your quotation will end up umlauted.

Another warning: ANSI codes can be entered by the old ALT-number pad
routine, just as ASCII ones could under DOS. The thing is, you have to
add a zero before the three digits. That is, hold down ALT and type 0151
on the number pad to get an em dash. I just assume XyWrite's keyboard
preempts that, in both DOS and Win versions, so I've never even tried it,
esp. as I have keyborad macros (F2-M and F2-N) for the dashes.

Patricia M. Godfrey
P and Q Editorial Services